Free The Legendary Playboy Surgeon by Alison Roberts

ultimately desirable.
    Not that there was any point in even thinking about it. It might have been there but when Kate had pulled away and given him that look of horror, it had been doused as effectively as if someone had dumped a bucket of icy water on his head.
    Had she felt it, too?
    But why would you run away from it?
    Connor simply didn’t understand. Just like he couldn’t understand the random bad luck that a thirteen-year-old girl who lived to surf and dance might have to lose a part of her body that made it possible to live her dreams. The knot in his gut tightened a notch or two.
    He could only hope for the best. And do his best for Estelle. The technician from the path lab was already standing by, looking nervous in the corner of the theatre. Well, she’d have to wait for a while to collect the specimen. If Connor had been meticulous about scrubbing in, it was nothing compared to how he was about to tackle this potentially life-
altering surgery.
    He’d be sending a message that the most senior pathologist available needed to examine the specimen, too. He would remove as much of the tumour as he could but the pathologist would have to X-ray and then thinly section the specimen to identify the lesional tissue. It would be Connor’s turn to stand by then, in case the pathologist needed a bigger sample. If there was any chance of a diagnosis that this was a benign osteoid osteoma, Connor was more than prepared to wait as long as it took. It was a damn shame they were still dithering about finding the funding to have a permanent pathology area up and running right here in the theatre suite so that samples could be processed faster.
    Mind you, if they did, they would have a pathologist in the department for every case like this and he might find himself working a lot more closely with Kate.
    Would he want to see her almost every day?
    No.
    Yes.
    Maybe.
    Some time later, Connor decided he would be prepared to deal with having Kate close by for the convenience factor. Waiting for the result took far too long. Apparently there’d been a fire alarm in the basement area of St Pat’s because some idiotic kitchen hand had left a stack of tea towels on top of a glowing element on a stove. Even after taking his time to remove the specimen, it had been a forty-five-minute wait to get the result phoned through.
    And it didn’t take nearly long enough because when that result came through, it was the worst possible outcome. Estelle had an aggressive osteosarcoma and it extended beyond the margins of the bone already removed.
    With a heart much heavier than the bone saw he requested from his scrub nurse, Connor moved on to the next phase of what was now a heartbreaking operation.
    * * *
    Kate surveyed the chaos that was still reigning in her laboratory.
    Not only was there equipment out of place, they were still cleaning up broken glass and someone was mopping up blood. Coming back for her possessions, Marie had slipped on something wet and had fallen, cutting her hand quite badly on a shattered test tube.
    Technicians were coming up to her constantly asking what to do about tests that had been interrupted and whether new samples would have to be obtained. The X-ray equipment had been malfunctioning when an urgent biopsy sample had come down from Theatre and it took a while to discover that a fuse had been tripped during the alarm with power being cut off to various points. Kate had sectioned the sample herself and dismissed the students in favour of doing the diagnosis with her own registrar, Mark, because it was no longer a good time to include the young doctors in the process. There was simply too much other troubleshooting that needed to be done.
    It was at that point that Kate noticed Lewis again. The head of department should have been in the same kind of firefighting mode she was in herself, restoring calm to the chaos in here, but he was standing to one side of the large area, looking preoccupied. And...grey. He